Saturday, May 05, 2012

‘Turing’s Cathedral,’ by George Dyson - NYTimes.com

"Unlike many historians, Dyson has no need to reach for contemporary relevance. He quotes Julian Bigelow, the Maniac’s chief engineer, in a passage that could serve as the book’s précis: “What von Neumann contributed” was “this unshakable confidence that said: ‘Go ahead, nothing else matters, get it running at this speed and this capability, and the rest of it is just a lot of nonsense.’ . . . People ordinarily of modest aspirations, we all worked so hard and selflessly because we believed — we knew — it was happening here and at a few other places right then, and we were lucky to be in on it. . . . A tidal wave of computational power was about to break and inundate everything in science and much elsewhere, and things would never be the same.”"